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Pulling Through

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Published: 25Dec2009
Word count: 685
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If anyone knows about a business challenge that seems insurmountable, it’s Michele Alexander. On a Tuesday morning two years ago, she woke up completely deaf.

Two years ago on a Monday evening, Alexander was sitting at her computer when she thought she heard a home alarm going off. Her husband told her he couldn’t hear anything, and Alexander thought nothing of it when she went to bed.

But her mood changed drastically when she woke up the next morning completely deaf. “I woke up the next morning and could hear nothing,” she said. “Well, actually I had tinnitus, so I heard heaps – the ringing in my ears seemed so loud against the deafness. It was something like the noise we hear being submerged in water.”

Alexander had actually been deaf in her left ear for 12 years prior to this incident. She wasn’t bothered because she had perfect hearing in her other ear. But with no hearing at all now, and a job as an ActionCOACH Business Coach, Alexander was in complete shock. Worse, she had a very busy Tuesday with several business coaching sessions with clients that day.

“It was a complete blur,” she said. “How I coached five clients, I do not remember, but I did! I think what helped was every business coaching session was face-to-face in a small office environment with no surrounding noise, and that I could already lip read really well.”

Despite going completely deaf, Alexander couldn’t let down all her clients. So she pulled through and kept coaching. She had plenty of challenges, however – she couldn’t use the telephone, the receptionist had to take detailed messages, and email became her “lifeline” in terms of communicating with her clients.

Even though she was able to coach her clients, she wasn’t able to actively try to get new clients – but she did gain a few new ones, anyway. “I was not able to sell. I wasn’t able to follow the 13-step process,” Alexander said. “But we had a fabulous BDM at the firm and I gained a few new clients during this difficult time that I still have today, over two years later. That certainly tells me that I cannot blame my hearing for ever losing a client.”

Something that helped her deal with this recent change, she added, was having the other coaches in her firm around encouraging her to be part of the ActionCOACH team. Her coworkers encouraged her to keep sitting in on meetings, and her husband found hearing devices to use with computers and cell phones to help her work, like a special office phone that interfaces with her hearing aid.

“After the first few weeks of waking each morning, hoping that my hearing had come back but it never did, and also after all the tests confirmed my hearing wasn’t coming back, my audiologist said I was a good candidate for a cochlear implant,” Alexander said. “My focus was to make it happen – so from being deaf in June, using temporary, almost useless hearing aids up until October, I then had an operation to give me back 60 to 70 percent hearing in my left ear. I coached all my clients Monday through Wednesday, had the operation on Thursday, and was back coaching the following Wednesday.”

Besides learning to live with being deaf briefly, she learned a few other things, too. “Being deaf made me use more inventive methods of communication,” Alexander said. “And my deafness has also taught me to ask for help – and that asking for help is not a weakness, and people want to help.”

“It made me ask people to speak more slowly and look at me when speaking because I wanted to ‘hear’ what they had to say. It made me much more aware and focused. I have had to slow down, but that’s not a bad thing. I think a big thing that keeps me going is that I love what I do. I have a purpose, I have great clients, and I have a fantastic support team of family, friends and colleagues."

To learn more, visit www.businesscoaching.com

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